Hi, we’re Adam and Penny. We know this section looks a bit long, but we’ve chosen to keep it that way for a reason. Leadership is complex and our approach is deeply personal, so we wanted to give ourselves enough space to really explain how we work. We think you deserve a full picture of who we are before we dive into your growth together. Thanks for taking the time to read through.
We are focused on helping leaders succeed
OUR APPROACH
We grow leadership capacity to meet 21st century challenges. We start by asking what you want to learn about leadership. Your learning questions and your leadership challenges drive our tailored offerings. We think about leadership and learning a bit differently from many others.
CREATIVE PRACTICE
We believe the complex challenges faced by businesses today demand fresh approaches, so we strive to do groundbreaking and creative work wherever we can. Creative Leadership is our practice. Between us: backgrounds in law, accounting, strategy, transformational change and banking, combined with accreditations that cover all different types of coaching and facilitation.
REAL STAKES
Since we started, we have spent a lot of time in rooms where the stakes were real. Our clients are typically leaders who are good at what they do, take development seriously, and are carrying more than most people around them realise. They are not looking for inspirational quotes but rather someone who can actually help. We do this work because we find it genuinely interesting.
AI LEADERSHIP
We believe AI is now part of modern leadership. We use it actively in our facilitation and coaching, modelling an experimentation mindset and healthy culture around its adoption, while working within your security, privacy and risk requirements.
SHARED VALUE
The creativity of your people is your biggest asset, we want to foster this in ways that create business value. We say no to positioning ourselves as experts who have all the answers. We have experience and expertise, but we have not arrived, we want to keep learning and growing as we create shared value.
LEVERAGE AND DISCOVERY
We look for leverage, using our experience and networks across the commercial, government and not-for-profit sectors to shape leadership coaching and learning programs for our customers. We say yes to discovery, to co-creating solutions for learning and leadership growth based on your questions, your strengths and your context
Adam
Adam was born in Zimbabwe and after arriving here in New Zealand started in banking at NBNZ which lead to a career in management and strategy. He made the big step of shifting into a Masters at Otago which in turn became the genesis of moving towards answering deeper questions of what shifts people, and how do we create the conditions for it?
He is co-founder of Ruku Ao, a collaborative initiative bringing together government agencies, the arts and community organisations, and a finalist in the New Zealand Innovation Awards in 2016. A past attendee was quoted recently as saying "initially, I think I didn't quite appreciate it all, but do you know 10 years later I'm still referring to it".
His training in psychodrama, embodied and somatic leadership through the Strozzi Institute sits alongside his coaching certifications and years as a public engagement practitioner. His passion comes alive though when he can get people out into the outdoors and he's a trusted facilitator for many of Outward Bound NZ's professional programmes. Alongside his work here he is also called upon as a regular facilitator for LDC Leadership in Practice and New Leaders programmes.
In a room, he works with what is alive: the undercurrents, the things people are sensing but not saying. The dynamic that has been running the meeting before anyone called it to order. He knows how to bring those things into the open and how to hold a group through what it finds. He keeps going further in his practice. His clients notice.
PENNY
Penny trained as a lawyer and qualified as a chartered accountant. Years at EY followed, then complex policy work across government. Then a deliberate move toward the work that actually held her attention: how leaders think, make decisions, and whether they can sustain themselves through it all.
That earlier career is still present in the work. The strategic precision. The ability to read what an organisation is actually doing, not just what it says it is doing. The instinct for what will hold up in practice rather than on paper.
But so is the other side. Penny works in systemic constellations, breathwork, cacao and somatic approaches to leadership. She holds qualifications as a PreKure Health Coach, an accredited Menopause Coach and achieved Chartered Member (CMInstD) status with Institute of Directors (NZ). These are not additions to the main work, they are part of the same view: that how a leader is as a person is inseparable from how they are leading which in turn is inseparable from the environment they are in. In her words "bringing the evidence base to woo woo".
She works with leaders at significant moments at a level most practitioners don't reach. She's interested in what's underneath: the pattern that's been running for years, the belief that was useful once and isn't anymore, the thing a person knows about themselves but hasn't said out loud yet. She has a capacity to bring people back to themselves to help them locate what they actually think, want, and are capable of, when the noise of a demanding role has made that hard to hear.
How we work
OUR VIBE
We aren't really big fans of working from a curriculum and we are really bad at working from a model chosen before we even met you. That just isn't our vibe. Instead when you work with us, we like to talk with you and figure out together. We don't tell you your context, we wait for you to tell it to us in your words. Letting you name the pressures you are feeling, the dynamics running underneath the surface and giving space to the questions that haven't even been spoken out loud yet.
HOLDING RANGE
We hold things most practices keep separate. A strategy offsite might move between a rigorous stakeholder analysis, a direct conversation about what's actually fracturing trust at the executive level and end with time to sit and breath under a tree. A coaching engagement might start with a leadership diagnostic, find its way into how someone is sleeping, what they're avoiding, or the question they haven't said out loud yet. We don't treat those as separate conversations. They're the same one, held with enough range to move between them.
TWENTY YEARS IN
Twenty years in, we're both more curious than we were at the start. About leadership, human behaviour and what makes development stick. Our clients don't get what we knew a decade ago. They get what we know now and its ever changing.
Whilst we are a practice of two, we deliberately work with a wider network of people we trust and rate highly.
You can trust us to build the team you need.
Some of the people we work with include:
Leadership Coach we've known and worked with for over 20 years. Jeanie brings depth of expertise and wisdom from a long public service career.
Human performance specialist and facilitator focused on sustainable high performance and recovery.
Wellington-based coach and facilitator who works with leaders using CliftonStrengths and non-directive coaching to ignite potential and help people lean into their authentic leadership.
A long-standing executive coach since 1995 working across public, private and not-for-profit sectors, using strengths-based, narrative and systems approaches with a clear, creative and pragmatic style.
Director at People Focus and a Conversational Intelligence certified coach and international facilitator who works with leaders and teams serious about business results, on the premise that words create worlds and conversations connect them.
Certified Nutritionist and Health coach who helps busy leaders make realistic shifts in food, movement, sleep and stress.
A holistic, soulful midlife leadership guide who blends bodywork, coaching and deep inner work to help leaders move out of their heads and into authentic, purposeful action.
Kāpiti-based coach, facilitator and leadership specialist (Director of Liminality) who supports senior leaders navigating complexity, known as a straight talker grounded in systems leadership and culture change.
A Wellington-based coach and facilitator who takes a pragmatic, practical approach, meeting coachees where they are and using curiosity and clear goals to support shifts in impact.